Blood on the Bones (3 page)

However, the Prioress, Mother Catherine, seemed to consider the current unique circumstances warranted a breach of the usual silence, for when the sisters, being as filled with curiosity as the rest of humanity, failed to obey her flapping commands, she supported her arm signals with orders of the vocal kind. Rafferty heard her voice carry clearly as she admonished her charges.

‘A little Christian charity, if you please, sisters. A man is dead. A child of Christ. He is entitled to some dignity in death, not to be stared at in his nakedness by women who should know better. Come. We must pray for his immortal soul.’

‘Amen to that,’ Rafferty muttered, thankful she was taking her flock off before he was obliged to order her to do so. He always hated to have an audience at a scene of crime. Though it amused him that she had just assumed the dead man was a follower of Christ. For all she, or any of them, knew, in life, he might have prayed to Buddha or some other deity. Or no one at all, of course, which, in an increasingly irreligious Britain, was probably the most likely option.

Beside him, he felt Llewellyn stir as if in disapproval of his flippant remark and he glanced at him. But, although Llewellyn didn't say anything, he didn't have to. Apart from his ma, Rafferty had never met anyone who could convey disapproval or irritation with just a few almost imperceptible shifts of facial muscles. And while Llewellyn's subtlety was a natural part of him, his ma's was not. As a mother of six, she had discovered the hard way that shouting was mostly counter-productive and, along the way, she had learned to conserve her energy.

Llewellyn had never possessed Kitty Rafferty's original, primitive, urge to shout and holler. Sometimes, Rafferty regretted it.

He knew where he was with shouting and bawling. It was what he had been used to for so long. He found these subtle manifestations of disapproval harder to counter or defend against.

Rafferty scowled – a far from subtle muscle shift. It was all right for Llewellyn. His present location was unlikely to make him feel as off-kilter as it made Rafferty. Flippancy would, he suspected, as he watched the nuns' departure and thought again of the letter in his pocket, be his only crutch in the days and weeks that loomed ahead.

Already – even without the letter and the anxiety it engendered – he was experiencing a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Even here, out in the open, with a fresh breeze scattering the first fallen leaves of autumn, he imagined he could smell the overpowering scent of incense. It was making him feel nauseous. Suffocated, even. And the investigation hadn't even properly begun yet.

Of course, that smell was linked in his mind with the Catholic ritual he had so loathed as a child and a youth: the breast-beating of confession; the expectation, no, the demand, that one believed without question; the authoritative nature of it all. None of these had appealed even then to the rebellious youthful Rafferty. In his maturity they held even less appeal.

But soon now, he would need to begin to question the sisters themselves. And although he was conscious that it wasn't a duty he could shirk indefinitely, it wasn't one he was looking forward to. He had always thought nuns an unnatural species, set apart from the rest of humanity, a species with whom he suspected he would not find communication easy. Why, he questioned, would any woman voluntarily agree to being shut away from the world, as this enclosed, Carmelite order, were? He had never understood it, doubted if he ever would, in spite of the fact that he had aunts who had become Brides of Christ on both sides of his family.

How many such Brides did one God need? he wondered. And what on earth did he do with them all?

Briefly, a smile flickered around his lips as humour came to his aid, and he thought that God must, by now, be finding Heaven a veritable Hell, and must also regret his growing harem, assuming all his Brides, the silent ones and the rest, were allowed to speak once in Heaven. Poor old God must get nagged 24/7.

‘Is there something about our latest unfortunate cadaver that amuses you, Rafferty?’

Rafferty emerged from his uneasy musings to find that Dr Sam Dally, the pathologist and his own, unkind, earthbound deity, had arrived and was standing at his elbow struggling to enclose his rotund body in its protective gear. His smile faded immediately at the thought that some of his previous blasphemy might have earned him his current reward. ‘No,’ he replied feelingly. ‘Nothing at all is amusing me.’ Not now, anyway, he added silently to himself.

By now, Lance Edwards, the police photographer had taken all the shots he needed. The SOCOs had carefully sifted and bagged most of the soil surrounding the body, along with the shucked off casings of insects with their telling life cycles. And as Rafferty and Llewellyn, again acknowledged by Smales, returned to the scene accompanied by Dally, he saw that now the cadaver lay open to their unhindered scrutiny.

Apart from the bite marks of the animal, which had left their indentations on the skeleton's forearm, even after the usual cycle of insect activity, the body still retained a fair amount of flesh, which, Rafferty supposed, indicated their corpse had not been in the soil for any great length of time.

Whoever had killed and buried him had removed all his clothes, presumably to make any identification more difficult if his body should one day be disinterred.

He hadn't been buried too deeply, either, which made the latter event more likely. As the day's events proved. Strange that the killer had neglected to remove the watch, which, although damaged by autumnal damp and the attentions of scavengers, as Rafferty had already noted, still retained sufficient of its original elegance to make clear it had been a costly timepiece.

Perhaps the watch had just been overlooked? Killers invariably made some error in their haste to cover up their crime. And given the number of women in the community and their presumed self-sufficient busyness about the house and grounds, the killer couldn't have had much time to murder his victim, strip and then bury him.

Maybe the watch had been a gift as an earlier brief burst of optimism had allowed him to hope? Maybe, Rafferty allowed himself another small glimmer of confident expectation, maybe they would get lucky and the watch would have an inscription on the back?

Get real, he told himself, as Sam, with difficulty, bent his plump body over his latest patient and began his examination. Such a nice, juicy lucky plum is not likely to fall into your lap; certainly not on this case, which was already beginning to feel like some deliberate punishment doled out by The Almighty.

If such it was, the deity was unlikely to make the investigation one easily solved, as Rafferty acknowledged with a sigh.

Beside him, hearing the sigh, and undoubtedly sensing some of Rafferty's lapsed Catholic angst, Llewellyn murmured tentatively, ‘I could do the preliminary interviews, if you'd prefer?’

For a moment, for several moments, Rafferty was tempted by the offer. But something, maybe some stray tenet of his lapsed faith, wouldn't permit him to be led to the temptation of the easy option. Not now. And certainly not here.

He straightened his back and strengthened his resolve in order to force out the ‘No,’ he wished could be a ‘Yes'. He glued on a false smile as he replied, ‘Grist for the mill, Dafyd. Grist for the mill for a lapsed lily like me.’

‘Maybe,’ Llewellyn murmured. 'Or maybe not. I suppose it depends on whether or not one believes one can truly escape one's upbringing.' He paused, then added, ‘I believe it was the Jesuits who said: ‘'Give me a child till the age of seven–'’

‘'And I will give you the man'', Rafferty finished for him. ‘Yes. I'm familiar with the quotation. And much as I hate to admit it, those boys knew what they were talking about.’

He rather wished they hadn't. But he was damned if he was going to let himself be easily spooked by a few nuns' habits and the smell of incense. ‘Are we not all brothers and sisters under the skin?’ He nodded towards the convent door through which the sisters had disappeared in response to the Mother Superior's admonishments. ‘It should be interesting to take a peek under theirs.’ And at least, this time, unlike his previous, unwilling, interaction with the Catholic Church, this time he would be doing the interrogating.

But, in his current unwelcome situation, Rafferty found this small consolation.

Trying to encourage
within himself some enthusiasm for the task ahead, Rafferty permitted himself no more prevarications. Pausing only to tell Sam Dally to send a uniformed officer to find them when he had finished examining the body, he strode with a brisk step towards the back entrance of the Carmelite Monastery through which the sisters had disappeared, conscious of Llewellyn, like a determined whipper-in, following on behind.

Momentarily forgetting his whipper-in, he muttered the question that had been puzzling him since his arrival at the scene: ‘Wonder why it's called a monastery rather than a convent?’

But, of course, the oracle that was the university educated Llewellyn, had heard and as he moved up to Rafferty's side, he proceeded to enlighten him.

‘I believe it's connected to the fact that the Carmelites were originally just a male order and–’

Annoyed with himself that he'd carelessly invited a lecture on top of the day's other torments, Rafferty tuned Llewellyn out and studied the building. It was a relatively modern one; Edwardian rather than medieval, from the outside it looked more like a pleasant country home rather than a house of prayer; the convent that had originally stood on the site having been torn down by Henry VIII when he indulged his sixteenth century wrecking spree of England's religious buildings. Elmhurst's Priory, another casualty of the times, although not razed to the ground like the earlier convent, instead, to this day, remained an enormous, impressive ruin. It provided a stark, rather eerie welcome to visitors approaching the town from the west.

Rafferty entered the large, echoey rear lobby, its lighting as frugal as only the wholehearted embrace of poverty could make it. Dimly, through the gloom, he made out three corridors leading off the high-ceilinged hall which was decorated with a statue of the Virgin and Child and three grim pictures of saints suffering assorted martyrdoms. They provided an even less welcoming ambience than did the blackened ruin of the priory.

‘Cheerful little gaff,’ Rafferty commented, with a gloom that was a perfect match for the hall. ‘Don't I just love Catholicism?’

If the rest of the convent was as coffin dark as the rear lobby, he suspected his adoption-for-convenience wearing of spectacles during a previous case, would turn into an adoption of necessity before this case reached its conclusion.

He followed his nose and the dim illumination, and, to get his bearings, found again the front entrance with its Latin display of the Carmelite motto beside the no longer used ‘Turn Room’ with its little turntable which had enabled gifts and mail to be accepted while the ‘turn Sister’ remained unseen.

‘
Zelozelatus sum pro domino deo exercituum
,’ Llewellyn had read the motto to him on their arrival, and, as expected, had gone on to provide the non-Latin reader Rafferty with its translation and the explanation: 'It's from the Vulgate or Latin Bible and means: 'with zeal have I been zealous for the Lord God of Hosts'.

‘Very nice, I'm sure,’ had been Rafferty's response. He had felt an urge to make some sarcastic comment suggesting they ought to produce some zeal themselves, but he had swallowed it.

Now that he'd seen the body, buried in the grounds of this house of contemplatives, he felt it might be appropriate if he allowed himself a few moments for contemplation. And, although aware that he found the life of an enclosed religious community incomprehensible, alien, surreal, even, he was aware that he would need to try to understand such a vocation if he was to get to grips with this case. Particularly if one of the nuns should turn out to have embraced the violence of some of the Catholic faith's earlier bloodletting adherents and had committed the ultimate sin.

So he read again the Carmel motto, studied again the Shield of Carmel with its groups of three stars which Llewellyn, his personal shedder-of-light where before had existed only darkness, had already explained, stood for Carmel in its Greek, Latin and Western eras. There was a hand with a torch, which Llewellyn had told him was supposed to remind the community of God's fiery intervention at the behest of Elijah on Mount Carmel.

The twelve surrounding stars symbolised the twelve points of The Rule by which the community lived: obedience, chastity, poverty, recollection, mental prayer, Divine Office, chapter, abstinence, manual labour, silence, humility and works of supererogation – Rafferty hadn't even bothered to seek enlightenment on the latter, words with six syllables being way beyond his desired vocabulary, particularly when they were religious ones.

But now, thinking again of the zeal of which the motto spoke, Rafferty swept past the statue of Saint Teresa of Avila the 16th century Carmelite reformer, who clutched the book and pen which, again, according to his personal Oracle, symbolised her power as a writer while the arrow clutching angel at her shoulder depicted God's love, something which, like their recently disinterred corpse, Rafferty, currently, had reason to doubt.

By now, with all this religious symbolism, Rafferty was getting a serious case of The Willies. He hurried down another gloomy corridor, Llewellyn at his heels, and finally found the Mother Superior's office. As he discovered as he flicked on the overhead light, like the rear lobby and the front entrance hall, her office was drab, badly lit and lacked physical comfort of any sort. It was simply furnished, with just a basic desk, hard wooden chairs and a battered, presumably, second-hand filing cabinet. Another, smaller, statue of the Virgin stood in a recess behind the desk. The sparsely furnished room was also empty of any human presence and Rafferty recalled that Mother Catherine had said she and the other nuns must pray for the immortal soul of their now disinterred cadaver. Presumably, she – and they – were in the community's chapel.